This chapter contains two personal accounts of psychiatric breakdown
while studying at university. David Brandon was a student first at the University of Hull and later undertook a social work course at the London
School of Economics (LSE). While at the LSE he had a 'breakdown', but
still qualified and later became Professor of Community Care at Anglia
Polytechnic University (APU) and a Chair of the British Association of
Social Workers. Jo Payne was a student at Durham University studying
Philosophy and Politics; she later became a social work student at APU in
Cambridge, where David Brandon supervised her second placement. She
qualified in 1998 and has mainly worked as a researcher. The chapter ends
with some conclusions about responses, treatment and recovery.

David Brandon

Going to Hull University in 1960, as a young social studies student, was an
immense challenge. I came from a poor home in Sunderland – itself a town
of poverty. My dad was in and out of mental hospital, with a track record of
erratic behaviour and regularly beating up my mother and myself. I'd
already spent some time living on the streets of London and carried the
shadows of many beatings from the age of two years onwards. Attending
the university was an alien and unsupportive experience. Sitting at the long
tables in the halls of residence, the public school, para-military culture
seemed a very long way from growing up on a council housing estate just

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